murthy@betaal.UUCP (C. V. R. Murthy) (10/02/90)
Hello! We are a small research group in a University in India interested in the ethenet adapters and TCP-IP, in the domain of PCs. Recently we have developed a dumb ethernet adapter card and tested the MIT PC/IP package for telnet and other utilities. They work fine. Now we wd like to make this card useable in different network s/w environments like Novell Netware, MSNet, etc. WE heard that there exists some place on the net who can develop standard packet drivers making the card versatile. I would like to hear the following: 1. Where can one get the NDIS packet driver specifications? What are real benefits of being compatible with this? 2. Contact of these people who can develop the packet drivers for our card; what exactly their business? In what form we should send our card in order to get the driver developed for us? Thanks in advance, ---Murthy. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Point: Tripping on the Wires.. C.V.Moorti. Personal Computer networks to distributed transactons! Phone: 5143609 5141421 (x2750).
jbvb@FTP.COM ("James B. Van Bokkelen") (10/03/90)
Most of the benefits are common to both specs. You can use one version of your application for all interfaces of a given class (Ethernet and Starlan represent one class, 802.5 is another class, it is quite hard to write one stack which can cope with both header formats). You can share the interface with other protocol stacks that use different packet types (e.g. Ethernet 'ethertype' or 802.2 SSAP/DSAP pairs). There are probably somewhat more NDIS drivers these days than Packet Drivers, but none of them are freeware. Reliability has been uneven on early versions of drivers under both specs... ---- The Microsoft/3Com NDIS spec (both version 1.0.1, which all currently available drivers conform to, and 2.0.1, which has more features) is available for anonymous FTP from vax.ftp.com, in pub/ndis-mac.v???.txt. Either is far too big to mail in one piece. Microsoft has a spin-off called DWB Associates (also in Redmond, WA) who are the only people I know of who write NDIS drivers for money (although there are probably others by now). There are no NDIS drivers available as freeware in source form, although some board vendors give away the executables. To use an NDIS driver, you need the Protocol Manager, developed and released as freeware by Microsoft (it is also available for FTP from vax.ftp.com). The primary user of NDIS is Microsoft's LAN Manager product. There are a number of other protocol stacks which use NDIS - most of the commercial TCP/IP packages can do so, and there exists a freeware NDIS-to-Packet Driver adapter module (developed by FTP Software) so you can use most Packet Driver software as well. NDIS is considerably harder to configure than some other approaches. The NDIS spec is also useable under OS/2. ---- The FTP Software Inc. Packet Driver spec. (currently at version 1.09) is also on vax.ftp.com, in pub/packet-d.* (.prn is for an HP Laserjet with TMS Proportional II font). It is small enough to mail... There are a number of people who have developed Packet Drivers for money, including Karl Auerbach of Epilogue Technology (karl@asylum.sf.ca.us) and Angela Lee of Pine Creek Software (206-687-1396). There are also a number who have done freeware Packet Drivers - your best point of contact there is Russ Nelson at Clarkson University (nelson@sun.soe.clarkson.edu), who manages a formal release of a number of drivers based on a common code skeleton he and others developed. The Clarkson drivers are subject to the GNU Public License. Packet Drivers are widely accepted in the Internet community, and among DOS TCP/IP users in general. The spec is concise, and the minimum time I know of for developing a new driver is 3 days (and probably nights; they had a demo to do). Beacuse there is no intermediate component on the order of Protocol Manager, installation and configuration is simpler. The Packet Driver spec is purely for DOS. James B. VanBokkelen 26 Princess St., Wakefield, MA 01880 FTP Software Inc. voice: (617) 246-0900 fax: (617) 246-0901